Sand and Feathers
by Lamia of the Dark
Summary: After several concurrent apocalypses are averted, a certain angel and demon pair decide they could use a nice little beach vacation... but due to a mistake by the travel agent, they end up double-booked... in a room with another pair of angels and the couple's young daughter. Four angels and one demon stuck in one room. (Don't worry, there's two beds.)
1. Arrival and Confrontation

~ Sand and Feathers ~

There was not just one singular apocalypse. There were in fact several concurrent apocalypses. Adam Young's awakening just so happened to coincide with that of Setsuna Mudo, the two occurring approximately halfway across the world from each other, and involving entirely separate factions of the forces of Heaven and Hell. Both apocalypse scenarios ended up being averted, with some far-reaching consequences that neither of them intended to reach the other, which caused more confusion in the cosmic fallout of their clean-up efforts, time reversals, revivals of the dead, and so on and so forth.

One of these consequences, which no one could possibly have been able to predict (except perhaps Agnes Nutter, whose wisdom is inaccessible after her descendant burned the only extant copy of her second book of prophecies), was that the hotel room booked by a certain pair of angels and their recently-adopted daughter somehow accidentally ended up being double-booked by the travel, so that when the family arrived, they found their room already occupied by a certain demon and angel.

* * *

Upon hearing the sounds of someone attempting to get into the room, Crowley jerked open the door and greeted them with a surly, "Who the hell are you?"

Golden eyes narrowed and the intruder said flatly, "Crowley."

"No, _I'm_ Crowley. Who the _hell_ are _you_?"

It was at this point that Aziraphale wandered over to see what was going on.

"Crowley, don't swear in front of the child," Aziraphale admonished his partner.

"Oh, trust me, she's heard worse," the man at the door said, causing both Aziraphale and the man holding the child to turn disapproving frowns on him.

"Do you know them?" Crowley asked his partner in an undertone.

Seemingly ignoring the demon, Aziraphale addressed the intruders, "Rosiel, Katan, and..." He drew a blank on the child's name. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen an angel that fresh from the Tree of Life before, much less met one while they were still a child.

Rosiel glanced over his shoulder at his partner, and Katan supplied, "Tiara."

"...and little Tiara," Aziraphale finished.

Crowley's face scrunched into slightly miffed expression at the way his angel cooed over the child. Of course, the three at the door were angels as well, although ones that had been created after Crowley's... departure from Heaven. Which explained why he was not familiar with the adult pair.

"Our daughter," Katan added.

And at that statement, Crowley slid his sunglasses down, peering over the top of them at the angel child - specifically, at the child's eyes, which were... he couldn't quite tell in this light, but definitely not red.

"Doesn't look like an Aion," he said, pushing his glasses back into place.

"She's not an Aion; she was born from the Tree of Life," Katan explained. "We've adopted her."

"Don't you have angels who specifically take care of raising the little ones and things like that?" the demon asked, not caring that it was a social misstep until he felt his partner plucking anxiously at his sleeve.

Rosiel and Katan glanced at each other, and this time Rosiel was the one who answered, "Extenuating circumstances."

"Yes, that's understandable, what with everything that's been going on recently," Aziraphale babbled out quickly, not giving Crowley a chance to say anything more. "And of course, that's the reason we found ourselves in a need of a little vacation now that things have settled down. Which brings us back to the initial question. What _are_ the three of you doing here?"

"Here as in the mortal realm, here as in this beach, or here as in this particular room?" Rosiel inquired.

Aziraphale didn't quite catch on to why he was being asked to clarify where exactly he meant by 'here' and, with a bewildered smile, simply gestured for his interlocutor to go on.

"_This_," Rosiel said pointedly, putting quite firm emphasis on the word, "is _our_ room. We booked it using a human travel agency and paid for it with human currency. So you two need to leave."

"There must be some mistake," Aziraphale said, still sounding entirely too confused for his partner's liking.

"Yes, obviously there's been some mistake," Crowley said. "And _not_ by us. We arranged things through human means as well, and paid for this room."

A tense silence stretched for a few long minutes, which was broken when Aziraphale strode over to the nightstand between the two beds, and picked up the hotel phone to call down to the front desk and get the matter sorted out.

Unfortunately, after a long and circular conversation with the hotel staff...

"They accidentally double-booked us and all of the other rooms are full. They say there's nothing they can do about it except refund the deposit for whichever of us isn't staying."

The tense silence from earlier threatened to make a reappearance, but they were spared the discomfort of that when the child piped up with a solution none of the adults would have considered:

"We can share!"

~to be continued~


	2. Sleeping Arrangements

~ Sand and Feathers ~

Although Crowley was somewhat upset over having to share the room with Aziraphale's angel friends (were they friends, or merely acquaintances? Aziraphale was so disarmingly friendly toward everyone that it became hard to tell), he did not outright object to the idea so much as he grumbled about it in a discontented yet resigned way, which let his partner know that he accepted the situation even if he was not happy about it.

As the new arrivals were settling in, the subject of sleeping arrangements came up.

"Technically, none of us really _need_ to sleep," Aziraphale pointed out.

"We're on vacation, angel," Crowley reminded him. "Relaxing and resting is the point, and that includes sleeping."

"I don't see what the problem is," Rosiel said. "We'll take one bed, you two will take the other. Aziraphale doesn't have to sleep if he doesn't want to. Tiara can sleep on the chair."

"You're going to make the child sleep on a _chair_?" Aziraphale seemed horrified at the prospect, even though the one chair in the room was a somewhat soft and comfortable armchair which wouldn't be terribly awful as a place for a small child to sleep.

"She's slept on worse," Rosiel replied offhandedly, drawing a disapproving frown out of his partner once more.

Which led Crowley to inquire, "Where exactly was this child being raised in Heaven? Sounds like she was mistreated, or at the very least neglected... I didn't think your types went in for that sort of thing."

Rosiel gave an indelicate snort at this pronouncement. He personally had been on the receiving end of Heaven's harshest treatment. Crowley had turned demon fairly early on, and didn't know the half of what went on up there after he'd left.

"Her caretakers were killed, and the paperwork wasn't filed correctly, so no one took over her care," Katan explained. "After being on her own, she eventually found her way to where the Aion children are... kept."

The way he hesitated before deciding on 'kept' as the term he was going with clearly told Crowley that the Aions - children born to two angel parents, children with unstable astral powers who were _not supposed to exist_ since angels were forbidden from procreating with one another - were imprisoned somewhere in the lower levels of Heaven.

"Anyway, things happened, the child became attached to Katan, and once the apocalypse was averted, we decided to raise her ourselves," Rosiel concluded, clearly wanting this conversation to be over and done with.

Crowley was suspicious of what the angel was omitting from his tale, but he was equally as eager as Rosiel to let the conversation be over and done with, so instead of asking any follow-up questions, he said, "It's getting late. We should get some dinner."

Aziraphale immediately perked up at that, but the other angels eyed Crowley with distasteful expressions at the suggestion.

"Well, you three don't have come! We're going." And, with that, Crowley grabbed his partner by the hand and pulled him out of the room.

The two of them walked to a nearby restaurant. It was close enough to the hotel that it would have been ridiculous to take the car, even though Crowley did so love to drive his car, yet far enough that Aziraphale was starting to feel a bit winded from the brisk pace by the time they arrived at their destination.

They enjoyed a leisurely meal. Crowley only drank, while Aziraphale ate, and the two of them engaged in a conversation of the type that old friends often have, which meandered through many different topics. And Crowley absolutely did not at any point during this time ask Aziraphale why he had invited the other angels to stay with them. Firstly, because that would have been rude and he wanted to enjoy the dinner date, not start an argument. Secondly, because he already knew exactly why Aziraphale had done it - and no matter how much Crowley _complained_ about it, he didn't _blame_ him for it.

* * *

Upon returning to their hotel room, Crowley and Aziraphale found that the other three angels had already gone to bed. (Or chair, in the case of little Tiara.)

If they'd had any doubt that Rosiel and Katan were a couple before, they certainly would have been persuaded otherwise by the sight of Rosiel lying draped over Katan's chest. The pair's legs were intertwined in such a confusing mess that Crowley wasn't sure whose were whose (it didn't help that their pants were the exact same color as each other's), and he couldn't imagine that it felt at all comfortable to them to have their limbs twisted around each other like that.

Of course, he'd hardly had time to do more than cast a single glance in their direction before Aziraphale crossed the room and put a blanket over them.

Crowley stretched out on the second bed, then turned on his side to watch his partner, who was still fussing about tucking the other couple in.

When he finally finished and turned toward him, Crowley said, "So, angel, are you going to stay awake all night, or what?"

"Yes," Aziraphale answered. He really wasn't one for sleeping. "I think I'll read."

"Did you bring a book with you?"

"Of course I brought a book."

He retrieved said book from his luggage, but quickly discovered that there was no place for him to sit and read it, since the room's only chair was occupied by the child.

"You can come over here with me, angel," Crowley said. When it seemed that Aziraphale might protest on the grounds of 'but won't the light/sounds/movement bother you while you're trying to sleep', the demon added, "Just don't drop the book on my head and I won't be bothered."

~to be continued~


	3. (Not So) Good Morning

~ Sand and Feathers ~

True to his word, Crowley wasn't bothered by his partner reading beside him, not even when little Tiara clambered over him to get to Aziraphale and demanded to be read a story. Not quite as true to his earlier words, Crowley was not overly bothered when a book did fall on his head - perhaps because it was a rather light and thin children's book (even though it was a hardbound copy), not whatever large and heavy thing Aziraphale had previously been reading.

"I distinctly recall asking you _not_ to drop a book on my head, angel," the demon grumbled, handing the battered copy of _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_ back to him.

"Oh, dear... are you terribly upset about it?" Aziraphale asked, sounding worried. "I didn't mean to let go of the book, but Tiara kept poking her fingers through the holes and I lost my grip on it."

At this pronouncement, Crowley turned over and looked up at him, all irritation wiped from his face by the expression of shock which now replaced it.

"You own a book with holes in it?"

"The holes aren't damage; they're supposed to be there. It's part of the book. And this isn't from my collection. Katan brought some storybooks for the child. Ah, no! Stop that." The last bit was directed at the child, who was reaching out a curious finger toward Crowley's eye, and would have surely poked him in it if Aziraphale had not stopped her.

"You've got funny eyes," the angel child said to the demon. "Are they real?"

Crowley just lay there blinking up at her as he tried to process the question. He had never spent much time around small children (and in the six millennia he'd lived, no the handful of years he'd spent looking after Warlock Dowling did not count as _much_ time).

At length, he responded, "Yes, these are my real eyes. Don't touch them."

"Are you a cat?"

"Most definitely not."

"Then what are you?"

"A demon."

"Okay," Tiara said, with that strange note of finality that children take when they are entirely done with a conversation. She leaned back against Aziraphale (upon whose lap she was perched), and said, "You can read now."

Crowley wondered if the child had ever seen a demon before, since she accepted his answer so easily, without pointing out that other demons didn't have eyes like his either. He turned over so he was lying fully on his side, but this time facing toward Aziraphale rather than being turned away from him, watching and listening as his partner read the storybook to the child.

It was slow going, as Tiara still seemed more interested in trying to stick her little fingers through every hole in the book's pages than she did in actually hearing the story.

Crowley was starting to doze off by the time they finally got to the part of the story where the caterpillar had gotten very fat from all the things he ate. Upon reaching this point in the story, Tiara put her hand on the page to stop Aziraphale from turning it, and proclaimed, "Like you!"

Crowley felt offended on his partner's behalf, but Aziraphale merely smiled and ruffled the child's hair affectionately.

"Yes, little one," he said. "Now move your hand if you want to hear the rest of the story."

* * *

It was rather late in the morning when Rosiel woke. He sat up and stretched, extricating himself from Katan with a fluid catlike grace as he did so.

Upon noticing that one of the other angels was finally up, Crowley said to child, "Oh, look! Your daddy's awake. Why don't you go to him?"

Tiara looked over to the second bed and, seeing that it was Rosiel who was up and that Katan still was not, the child remained firmly stuck to Aziraphale. For his part, Aziraphale was not at all impressed with the dismissive manner in which Rosiel treated the child. It was clear to him that Rosiel had only accepted responsibility for the child because his partner wished it, not that he had any particular interest in helping to raise the child.

Aziraphale had already read _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_ out loud a dozen times. (For some reason that Crowley could not fathom, the child didn't want to hear any story other than that one, even though there were several others available to choose from.) Somewhere around the seventh read-through Crowley had noticed that his angel's enthusiasm for reading the story to the child was starting to become a bit strained. After a bit of contemplation on the matter, he realized it wasn't that Aziraphale was losing patience with the child or with the repetitive task, but that breakfast was overdue. However, not wanting to disturb the sleeping angel couple, Aziraphale had doggedly continued reading.

"Anyway," Crowley said, standing up from the bed. "It's about time for breakfast, isn't it?"

"Or past it," Aziraphale said.

Turning to address Rosiel, Crowley said pointedly, "You can watch your own kid while we go have breakfast, right?"

Rosiil gave a delicate shrug and began playing the ends of his hair between his fingers, seemingly disinterested in the subject. "I suppose."

The child, who had previously shown no interest in food or eating, continued to cling to Aziraphale but looked toward Crowley as she asked, "Can I have a breakfast too?"

"Well, that's settled, then. Tiara is coming with us," said Aziraphale, already carrying the child toward the door as he said it.

"What kind of name is Tiara anyway?" Crowley asked on the way out. "Isn't that some type of crown?"

The child, who did not know much about types of crowns, but did know here own name, informed the demon: "It's short for Teialiel."

~to be continued~


End file.
